In modern retail shops, for example supermarkets, the customers or purchaser collect articles exhibited in the show room before each article is bought by the customer or purchaser. For this, many supermarkets have shopping carts (also called trolley) so that a customer or purchaser could transport the collected articles to a checkout counter. At the checkout counter, the customer or purchaser buy the collected articles by paying the total price of all collected articles. For example, the payment could done in cash or using debit or credit cards.
To calculate the total price of all collected articles of a customer, a cashier of the checkout counter registers each article so that the sum of the price of each registered article is the total price to be paid by the customer. In modern supermarkets, each article is electronically scanned by the cashier using for example a barcode scanner so that each article could identified. Based on the article identification, the price of the scanned article is obtained from a supermarket database.
In the most cases, each article has a machine-readable identification, for example a barcode or a QR-code. This optical machine-readable identification is placed on the articles, especially on the package of the article. On each checkout counter, an optical scanner is arranged for using by the cashier on the checkout counter so that the cashier could scan each article by using the checkout counter scanner for registering each collected article from customer.
However, these well-known checkout procedure in modern supermarkets are very uncomfortable for the customer and the cashier, because each article collected by the customer have to put from the shopping cart on the checkout counters table and each article on the checkout counters table have to scan manually by the cashier at the checkout counter. After scanning, each article have to put from the checkout counters table back to the shopping cart. This is slow and stressful for all person involved in the process.